How Gotham Chopra mines the sports world for deeper meaning

Gotham Chopra was in the stands on April 20, 1986 when Michael Jordan lit up the Boston Celtics for 63 points in an NBA playoff game. A wide-eyed, pre-teen boy then, Chopra still recalls the feeling of watching a sports deity register a defining performance against his favorite team at the Boston Garden.

Gotham was at that game so many years ago with a family friend, however — not with his father, Deepak Chopra, the renowned author and self-help evangelist. Chopra the elder remains somewhat mystified by his son's sports obsession to this day.

"He still doesn't understand why, at 10 a.m. on the West Coast on a Sunday, I'm like 'Do not call me for the next three hours — the Patriots are playing and I can't be bothered,'" Gotham Chopra says of Deepak.

Sports have remained a subject of fascination since Gotham Chopra was a young boy watching a basketball god destroy his favorite NBA team. He's even turned them into a profession, producing several acclaimed sports documentaries for ESPN, Showtime and others. Chopra's latest project, a series called The Religion of Sports, debuts on the Audience network on Nov. 15. It examines the deep role athletic games play in the lives of so many devoted fans.

A fan of the Brazilian soccer team Flamengo in 2014.

Image: Leo Correa/AP

Chopra calls the six-week series a look at sports "through the lens of spirituality and religion." It studies threads common to the two realms — ideas like hope, belief, pilgrimage, curses and liberation, as well as mythic feats not unlike Jordan's 63-point playoff game in 1986.

Episodes of the new series focus Chopra's lens on soccer, baseball, mixed martial arts, eSports and more. Tom Brady and Michael Strahan are both executive producers on the project. Each offered creative feedback as well.

Chopra calls The Religion of Sports a "culmination of everything I've worked on and been personally involved in my whole life."

That's a big statement, but the project indeed revisits a theme familiar to Chopra's work: Sports as a way into larger existential subjects. Take two of his more well-known projects, for example.

Chopra, left, with Kobe Bryant in 2014.

Image: Eric Charbonneau/Invision/AP

The 83-minute Showtime documentary Muse, released in 2015, stars Kobe Bryant — but it's more than a basketball film. It studies the roots of Bryant's inspirations from the hoops world and beyond while offering viewers intimate access to the NBA legend as he confronts for the first time a future without the game. Its central tension is how a person moves on from the thing to which he's dedicated his entire life.

Then there's The Little Master, a documentary produced for ESPN's "30 for 30" series about the Indian cricket star Sachin Tendulkar. Despite focusing on an athlete from a sport that's hardly a blip on the American radar, the film became a hit for ESPN — which is exactly what Chopra foresaw happening.

"It's an alien sport to the American audience, but what's not alien at all is the feeling of being passionate about sports and falling in love with athletes," he says. "And as with all things in India, it's that 100 times over. You think Derek Jeter is a big deal? Let me tell you about this guy who a billion people all love. Let me tell you about this guy, this place, this sport."

Up next for Chopra is working with Uninterrupted, a platform founded by LeBron James for athletes to tell personal stories. He also just wrapped on another project with ESPN, this one following Major League Baseball legend David Ortiz through his final season with the Boston Red Sox.

"It's not dissimilar from the Kobe piece in that it follows an iconic Hall of Fame athlete who's trying to understand what he's walking away from and how to walk away from it," Chopra says.

That's spoken like someone who sees sports as a window into life's biggest questions — a sort of religion, even.

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